'Escape from Saigon' captures Vietnam War's end

By Ann Connery Frantz, Correspondent

Sunday

Dec 17, 2017 at 3:00 AM

Dick Pirozzolo and fellow Vietnam vet Michael Morris joined forces to write a novel about the final moments of the devastating war. Titled "Escape from Saigon," it creates fictional characters in very real events — soldiers, civilians and news correspondents trying to cope with the crumbling of the last stronghold before the U.S. evacuated personnel, Americans and Vietnamese sympathizers and the Viet Cong took over the city and signaled the conflict's end.

Though each of them moved into careers after their return in 1975 - Pirozzolo to journalism, working for the Telegram & Gazette's Southbridge and Webster news bureaus, and then to public relations and writing, and Morris to writing and editing as a journalist - they met as writers and formed an idea. Pirozzolo, a captain in the Air Force, often worked with the press corps there. "Around the mid-'90s, a movement started to recognize Vietnam and to reconcile with Vietnam. I've returned there a number of times, writing about the current state of affairs." Some of his articles appeared in the Boston Herald and on the op-ed pages of the Washington Times.

"I started working with Mike," Pirozzolo said. "We wrote two books about home building together. We were both veterans, and we talked about maybe someday doing something about Vietnam." They realized pretty quickly, though, that a definitive history would be better left to the historians. And, he said, "we would be 90 before that was done. So we settled on the very last 30 days of the war and structured the book day by day, with flashbacks to play with time a little, give readers a chance to see what it was like to live in Saigon before the war, to be a journalist there for 10 years."

Younger Americans never experienced the first televised war, in which daily videos and newscasts brought slaughtered civilians and soldiers into American homes each evening, terrifying parents and changing many Americans' minds about the ambiguous jungle war being fought thousands of miles away. It was a horrific, unwinnable war, killing 60,000 U.S. soldiers and countless more civilians and Vietnamese soldiers.

In April 1975, the war was finally collapsing as North Vietnamese troops moved into the last stronghold, Saigon. The city's fall would end any hope for South Vietnam. As conquering troops moved in, thousands of U.S. personnel and civilians who had worked with them sought to flee rather than be slaughtered by the North Vietnamese. They flooded the U.S. embassy and other departure points, filling military planes and helicopters.

This is where "Escape from Saigon" is set.

They tell the story through the lives of war correspondents Sam Esposito and Lisette Vo, sandwiched between a terse narrative about the final decline of opposition to the north. Sam returns to Vietnam as a Washington, D.C., newspaper correspondent after the Kennedy assassination, wanting to get away from the U.S. He's remained there for 13 years. Lisette is half-French, half-Vietnamese, and American, working for a broadcast news company. "She portends the rise of women in the media," Pirozzolo said. They remain until the bitter end because of their work. "They're journalists," Pirozzolo said.

To the authors, journalists were heroes during that war, not flinching from what they believed they must tell the American people about the war taking American lives for so little cause.

"We wanted to work in fiction. I'd written five nonfiction books, two with Mike. I wanted to take that artistic and creative step, to write a novel you would read because you love the relationships between the people - something interesting and compelling, with a lot of action."

"The North Vietnamese were very mean-spirited and cruel toward the South Vietnamese," Pirozzolo said. The authors record several infamous moments during the frantic effort to escape: Operation Babylift, the attempt to fly half-American babies out of the country to save their lives (only to see the first cargo plane crash, killing the first group); the fake family evacuations, in which corporate and embassy employees and journalists claimed Vietnamese cohorts and their children as "family" to cram them onto rescue aircraft (through the averted eyes of harried officials); the frantic meltdown of Ambassador Graham Martin, trying to weigh White House orders to suspend the airlift against the horrific reality they faced, with disastrous results.

"No one ever tells you when the last plane leaves," Pirozzolo said.

It's a complex story, and the narrative carries itself through the reality of the situation with well-paced tension. To supplement their story, the authors used original sources. "We did a lot of research on original documents," he said. One helpful source was The New York Times. "We used its 'time machine' online; you actually see images of the front page of the newspapers at the time. That made a lot of it come alive for us."

They interwove their writing. "It worked because the book was episodic; we didn't have to follow a single thread all the way through. He worked on some characters and I'd work on some characters; we'd switch, check each other's copy, and argue about the points and information. I don't think anybody could tell which part I wrote, which he wrote."

In retrospect, he said, the war was a mistake, "a misunderstanding of the relationship between the Chinese and the Vietnamese, and I think, though there are a million opinions out there, there was an expectation that this would go down like Korea. The country would be divided. We should have recognized that it was not the spread of communism but a country that wanted to be independent; maybe we could have influenced how the country was shaped if we'd realized that."

He's working on a new novel centered on an overseas correspondent, while working at his Boston PR agency. It's shaping up, he said. The first book took about two years to complete. "Our goal was to tell a really good, compelling story that people would want to read, to move along in almost a cinematic fashion - a book for anybody, fast paced and set in an exotic location."

A Wellesley resident, he works now with the Boston Global Forum, a think tank focused on any number of global issues. "It's based largely on promoting peace in the world among them," he said. That ranges from issues surrounding Chinese expansion in the South China Sea to cybersecurity. "We look at the role hacking plays in intruding on our peace and security," he said.

There's a bit of the fatalistic mood to Pirozzolo as he sums up why the U.S. continues to go to war in other nations.

"We don't learn our lessons," he said. Then he laughs softly. "We live in a very good-hearted country that makes a lot of assumptions and a lot of mistakes. I don't know if we'll ever learn our lesson."

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